Public Interest Registry
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| Non-profit | |
| Industry | Internet, Domain registry |
| Founded | 2002 in Reston, Virginia |
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Key people
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Brian Cute, David Maher, Maarten Botterman, Marc Saitta, Paul Diaz, Tom Correia, Kim Van Wyngaardt, Tony Connor, Lauren Price, Dave Stewart, Elizabeth Finberg, Hal Lubsen (Afilias), Ram Mohan (Afilias) |
| Website | pir |
The Public Interest Registry is a Reston, Virginia-based not-for-profit created by the Internet Society (ISOC) in 2002 to manage the .ORG top-level domain. It took over operation of .ORG in January 2003 and launched the .NGO and .ONG domain names in March 2015. The organization is involved in internet policy, education and security issues, like the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) protocol, domain tasting, DNS filtering and internet adoption in third world countries.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) circulated a request for proposals in May 2002 for a new organization to manage the .ORG domain. The Internet Society (ISOC) put forth one of eleven proposals ICANN received. ISOC won an endorsement within ICANN and was recommended to the selection committee in a preliminary report. At a public ICANN meeting in Bucharest in 2002, ISOC CEO Lynn St. Amour and Afilias CTO Ram Mohan presented ISOC's proposal to manage the .ORG registry. The proposal included the creation of a separate entity, called the Public Interest Registry, to oversee the .ORG domain. Its board of directors is appointed by ISOC. Afilias was selected as the back-end technical provider for .ORG under contract with the Public Interest Registry. The largest domain transfer in history occurred on January 1, 2003, when ICANN had VeriSign delegate 2.6 million domains to the Public Interest Registry. An Internet Society Vice President, David Maher, became the chairman. The following month, Ed Viltz became the organization’s first CEO.
On June 23, 2010, The Public Interest Registry implemented the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) protocol for .ORG. DNSSEC is intended to prevent cache poisoning attacks by making sure internet users arrive at the URL they intended. The implementation began in test environments in mid-2009. The protocol was implemented by PIR's technical partner Afilias during the tenure of former CEO, Alexa Raad, who played a role in creating the DNSSEC Industry Coalition. Raad resigned from the Public Interest Registry in late 2010. The non-profit had an interim CEO, until it recruited former Afilias executive Brian Cute as its third chief executive officer on January 14, 2011.
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